They claim that even if the council had been acting in the woman’s best
interests, officials should have consulted her family beforehand and
also involved Italian social services, who would be better-placed to
look after the child.

Brendan Fleming, the woman’s British lawyer, told The Sunday Telegraph:
“I have never heard of anything like this in all my 40 years in the job.

“I can understand if someone is very ill that they may not be able to
consent to a medical procedure, but a forced caesarean is unprecedented.

“If there were concerns about the care of this child by an Italian
mother, then the better plan would have been for the authorities here to
have notified social services in Italy and for the child to have been
taken back there.”

It will be raised in Parliament this week by John Hemming, a Liberal
Democrat MP. He chairs the Public Family Law Reform Coordinating
Campaign, which wants reform and greater openness in court proceedings
involving family matters.

He said: “I have seen a number of cases of abuses of people’s rights in
the family courts, but this has to be one of the more extreme.

“It involves the Court of Protection authorising a caesarean section
without the person concerned being made aware of what was proposed. I
worry about the way these decisions about a person’s mental capacity are
being taken without any apparent concern as to the effect on the
individual being affected.”

The woman, who cannot be named for legal reasons, is an Italian national
who come to Britain in July last year to attend a training course with
an airline at Stansted Airport in Essex.

She suffered a panic attack, which her relations believe was due to her
failure to take regular medication for an existing bipolar condition.

She called the police, who became concerned for her well-being and took
her to a hospital, which she then realised was a psychiatric facility.

She has told her lawyers that when she said she wanted to return to her
hotel, she was restrained and sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

Meanwhile, Essex social services obtained a High Court order in August
2012 for the birth “to be enforced by way of caesarean section”,
according to legal documents seen by this newspaper.

The woman, who says she was kept in the dark about the proceedings, says
that after five weeks in the ward she was forcibly sedated. When she
woke up she was told that the child had been delivered by C-section and
taken into care.

In February, the mother, who had gone back to Italy, returned to Britain
to request the return of her daughter at a hearing at Chelmsford Crown
Court.

Her lawyers say that she had since resumed taking her medication, and
that the judge formed a favourable opinion of her. But he ruled that the
child should be placed for adoption because of the risk that she might
suffer a relapse.

The cause has also been raised before a judge in the High Court in Rome,
which has questioned why British care proceedings had been applied to
the child of an Italian citizen “habitually resident” in Italy. The
Italian judge accepted, though, that the British courts had jurisdiction
over the woman, who was deemed to have had no “capacity” to instruct
lawyers.

Lawyers for the woman are demanding to know why Essex social services
appear not have contacted next of kin in Italy to consult them on the
case.

They are also upset that social workers insisted on placing the child in
care in Britain, when there had been an offer from a family friend in
America to look after her.

An expert on social care proceedings, who asked not to be named because
she was not fully acquainted with the details of the case, described it
as “highly unusual”.

She said the council would first have to find “that she was basically
unfit to make any decision herself” and then shown there was an acute
risk to the mother if a natural birth was attempted.

An Essex county council spokesman said the local authority would not
comment on ongoing cases involving vulnerable people and children.

This may have allready happened in Ontario and a similar order could be
obtained here in Ontario.

The CAS of Ottawa habitually remove children at birth from a variety of
mothers and attempt to remove babies at birth almost every week.
Many of these attempts are prevented by lawyers for the parents but not
all are successfull.

Many of these apprehensions at birth are the result of fabrication of
evidence by "child protect workers and their lawyers.